THE CHRONICLES OF FINALGAMER
Origin of the FinalGamer

The city of Chicago offered a future of prosperous times in the same way London offered good living in the Victorian Century.  It was a good life if you had the money, the luck and the perseverance...as well as sometimes the right connections.
Everyone else was filtered out into the sewers and slums, like rainwater to a river, where there would be an overflowing multitude of the destitute.  But many would die from either advanced diseases regardless, or from the general poverty that killed their souls.
But that was all in the slums of the Windy City.  Chicago was not an evil place, not entirely corrupt.  It was just quite pessimistic about the poor and the slow.  If you couldn't keep up, you should drop out of the race.  This was not a cruel philosophy to them.  This was the philosophy that kept the city alive, like the gazelles that had to outrun their friends when the cheeetah hunted them.
It was a very advanced time, perhaps 1300 years after the greatest cataclysm in human history as of yet.  A time when humanity reached its zenith of war.  After the most horrific of wars that hrough an advancing wave of technology had decimated the world into chaos, they had a new race of creatures to contend with.

Anthros.

Anthropomorphic animals were not a new concept.  They had spanned far back in the echelons of human history, to the days of pagan rituals, to the time of ancient gods of the desert tribes of Africa.  It had been the idolism of many humans in either spiritual, moral, existential, fantastical and even sexual terms.
Yet even within the apocalyptic wasteland that became the 22nd century, there still remained what some would call madness.  And what others would call a miracle.  The Circe project, beginning in 2102 AD/CE, was both.  Very few records remain of how, what or even why such an event transpired within laboratories in Iceland.  Records were lost, factions remember different parts from others.  But one thing they all agree on.  The scientists, beyond all reason and after many failures that each made them learn one mistake from another, managed to finally create the first anthropomorphic animal.
A dog.  A mutt of an unknown breed that crawled out of a chamber with hands and feet perfectly developed.  The feet were like that of a dog's paws with albeit more stronger leg muscles, stretched past human limits in both appearance and musculature.  Yet the hands were exactly human, despite the fur and black hardened claws, finger ends being a stubby lump of black like freshly roasted bread rolls.  But they created an anthropomorphic animal, the perfect blend between human and animal.
What followed afterwards was years of suffering and confusion.

Humanity has always been afraid of that which it does not know of.  The American horror writer HP Lovecraft wrote "Fear is the most strongest and ancient human emotion.  And fear of the unknown is the most powerful and ancient of fears."
In this world at least, this was very true.  For every form of unknown encountered, humanity has either fought in fearful attack or cowered until they could.
Almost every downfall of humanity, or at least many of them, have been centred on fear of the unknown.  The fear that more powerful humans had when they encountered unknown parts.  When fear was gone, this was replaced with avarice.
Every part of humanity has experienced this.  Between tribes, countries, races and genders.  And now they had to face their own science.  They were afraid of their own science, and now they had to overcome fear in order to fight it the only way they knew how.  But the problem was, there was nothing to fear.  In the same way that they had little to fear from their own species on a general consensus, they neither had much to fear with the anthros.
But of course, there are always the skeptics.  And so the laws were written up.

At first it was hard for them to face the fact that now meat seemed to be something barbaric, even more so due to more sentient creatures.  So the quick solution came from soya and tofu-based foods which many at first were resistant to, but they had to do it the Linda McCartney way.  Make it taste just like meat.  And they did, right to the very thickness it gave to your tongue, thankfully.
That was cleared easily.  Now came the acceptance.
The first human encounters with the anthros ranged from those who worshipped the very ground they walked on, to the ones who would kill and eat them because they were simply animals.  So more laws were written, for terms of conduct and applications of having equal rights to humans, which to many was unbelieveable for the sudden granting of laws to a completely new bunch of sentient beings.  Laws and rights that took years for other humans to receive, but for a race that humanity itself created (and in technicality were gods for the anthros to create them), to receive them in the space of several months?
Surely it was madness.  And so there came conflict.
Wars broke out, and anthros became their own society outcast from the others, with the odd Romeo and Juliet situations here and there between anthros and humans.  Many of them ended either for the better, the same as Shakespeare wrote it, or far worse than the bard could ever have imagined.  Even for a man who thought of pouring poison in someone's ear for one of his screenplays.

But eventually, the anthros became stronger than the humans, thanks to the many experiments that made them stronger than humans with better immunities and stronger muscles.  Plus they had retained their natural weaponry and now that they had human intelligence, they soon developed unnatural weaponry to the level of humans.
Humanity was frightened because of the fourth World War.  Or as some more dramatically call it, the Human Holocaust.  A war that truly nearly wiped out all of humanity.  The human population of Earth was approximately 9 billion beforehand, not including other humans off in colonies in space and elsewhere.
By the end of this nuclear war, the human population was only 3 billion.  Society itself was ravaged to the point that most of the Earth became a wasteland.  Some areas however, such as Iceland, were well-protected, and it was in that very sheltered land, the anthros first came from.  And not just creatures that had been alive alongside humans.
Even with humanity struggling to work together in the centuries of rebuilding both their society and their history, they clashed with the anthros and their various growing tribes, who had both all of the weapons of humanity and being near unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat when trained.  Of course they also lost many as well, perhaps half of all the anthros that existed at that point.
Eventually, after decades of struggle, there came an alliance of peace, within a bloody handshake of both hand and paw.  Communities grew together, society restored itself overtime, bonds of both friendship and love developed between man and anthro.  By the time of 3513 AD/CE humans and anthros had become close enough to let 1300 years of animosity slide past them, ridiculed in comedy clubs throughout rebuilt cities, provided they were kept in good taste.

But in this year of 3513 AD/CE, is one character who is the entire reason for this story to be written.  He does not have a destiny to become the saviour of his world, but this story is about him nonetheless.
A velociraptor, trying to live life in the slums.  He wasn't in poverty, but he could smell the slightly-stained blankets already beckoning for him.  He had his job as a bartender's assistant, drifting from place to place with a general knowledge of wellbeing but nothing from literature.
The raptor was almost alone in the world other than the few friends he made in Chicago, his parents deceased after a riot in London 20 years ago.  He grew up in an orphanage, like many others would.  He learned the ways of the street from a gang of friends he was indebted to, but lost contact with them after being adopted by a human male and a female horse, a mare.  He learned soon of puberty and sex when he was 12 but was never molested.  He had to be moved for reasons involving his adopted mother's fetishes when neighbours grew suspicious concering the presence of a child in the house.
Currently he was now on the run from the police.  Or at least what he assumed was the police, some form of authority who tried to corner him in an alleyway as they ordered:
	"STOP RUNNING!"
	"FUCK OFF YOU PRICKS!"

Through the various alleyways, the raptor outran the ones behind him, but some were trying to leap from the shadows or in front of him, forcing him to wallkick past them with the odd lucky strike to their faces, trying to look for something better to get away with than on foot, leading them back the way he had come from through scrapyards and crummy apartment blocks like single dusty bricks, before he saw his motorcycle, his prime escape tool parked nearby.  Hopping on and turning it on, he charged into the distance to the roads screaming:
	"SEE YA FUCKERS, HAHAHAHAHAA!"
The the chasers picked up their radio to transmit:
	"Sierra Papa Victor, suspect's escaped on a black Triumph motorcycle, make is Speed Triple 900cc, repeat, black Triumph motorcycle 900cc, registration Whiskey Eight Niner, India Golf Four."
The raptor knew, despite his cocky exit, that they'd have backup onto him, he'd been in trouble with the law before because of his activities with this very motorcycle, the illegal street races and such.  So he held his grip steady on the handlebars and awaited any sign of his assailants upon the roads through the various more wider paths between the slums.
After 2 minutes of nothing, he heard a car behind him, a strange one he hadn't seen before, which worried him moreso as he was sure it was the police after him.  But seeing as he had to escape somehow he made a daring turn through an alleyway where the car could not chase him, nearly getting clipped by the bumper, speeding through the narrow corridor to reach the other end before anyone else showed up.
The motorcycle exited the alleyway and sped off the other way, the car soon following him a minute later on the main road.
	"Oh you wanna play fucker, well fuck THIS!"
Giving the assailants the finger, he swerved past dustbins clanging relentlessly in the night amongst the droning and sirens hounding after him.  The raptor's legs shook with the engine and his growing irritation at the cops, only wanting to finish his delivery of Carlsberg to the bar and go to bed.  But oh no, they decide to pick tonight.  The car gained up to him with the blaring orders:
	"PULL OVER YOUR VEHICLE AND SURRENDER, CITIZEN!"
This annoyed him greatly and he decided to spin around on the road attempting to slide around in a half circle on the car, bringing out one hand to scrape against the windows and paint in a screeching fashion and back the way he came.  The car had to stop at this and the fugitive felt like he was home free with a good humiliation upon his opponents, cackling to the wind, until he looked before him to see a few more cars come up and surprise him to a screeching halt, as they stopped too colliding slowly for the raptor to end up on their hoods right into the windscreens, but not breaking them.  They immediately came out to restrain him on the hood, holding his arms as he struggled.
	"Le-LET GO OF ME!"
	"Sorry kid, but you're our lucky contestant."
And with that came a syringe from one of them, injected into the unwilling captive's neck as he tried to fight back.  Soon the fight turned internal, against the sudden unconscious that came upon him.  His eyes tried to stay open, but they shut forcefully against his own will, murmuring vague insults before he was put into one of the cars.  They drove away away onto the larger roads, his motorcycle on its side, cold and alone in the middle of the road.